What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method

Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....

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What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...
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A Pencil For Your Land

Asian Americans Suffer From Trump’s Racist Attacks Too

The long history of America’s hostility toward immigrants from China, Japan, and Korea

We are all familiar with the racist tactics that vaulted Donald Trump into the Oval Office. He demonized Mexicans, he denounced Muslims, and he cozied up on Twitter to ardent White supremacists. In recent weeks, he’s relentlessly attacked the Black Lives Matter protests.  Amid all the vitriol, it’s easy to overlook ...
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Asian Americans Suffer From Trump’s Racist Attacks Too

Sociology of Power and Authority

Fall 2017 at University of Virginia

The Sociology of Power and Authority was offered in Fall 2017 at the University of Virginia. It was an upper-division undergraduate seminar with 20 students, meeting for an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week. On the first day of the course, several students revealed, unprompted, that they had been ...
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Sociology of Power and Authority

Marx’s Radical Development

Following Marx’s Train of Thought

There have been a few recent calls for a return to Marx, or openness to the thought that he “got it right.” To be sure, Marx got a lot -- a lot -- right, but simply peering into his writing desk -- as if setting things right for all time ...
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Marx’s Radical Development